Check out the trailer HERE A thumping good trailer for Brooklyn’s Finest starring Richard Gere and Don Cheadle has hit town. Write this off as ’just another cop drama’ at your peril. Straightaway there are overtones of influential nineties crime thriller New Jack City (1990) with branded sportswear, expensive loose fit shirts, 1920s-30’s style hats and heavy bling. Plus note how leather is used to signify the dark side of human nature. Don Cheadle, playing a cop who has been undercover too long and journeyed too deep, in an omnipresent leather flat cap; also when Ethan Hawke’s financially burdened officer ‘goes bad’ he dons a black leather blazer. This sort…

Clothes from films set during 1970s Less a costume movie and more a fashion one, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is typical of its naughty director Russ Meyer in all the best ways. To celebrate Grease Sing-a-Long coming to Vue cinemas this month, we have five goodie bags to give away. Go Rydell! Costume designer Carloine Harris has recreates the vibrant look of the 1970s. Despite its routine ending, The Runaways is a music biopic to be reckoned with. Michael Caine is the epitome of badly folded cool. If you have never found Star Wars in the least bit kinky before, prepare to loosen your breeches. The Big Lebowski…

A 13 minute Man of Steel featurette has just been released discussing the suit. The first still from Beauty and the Beast, aka La belle & la bête. Costumes by Pierre-Yves Gayraud. Star Trek’s Michael Kaplan confirmed as costume designer for Star Wars Episode VII. Michael Kaplan gives Clothes on Film the lowdown on his Star Trek Into Darkness costumes. Director Bryan Singer has tweeted photographs of Nicholas Hoult, Hugh Jackman and James McAvoy in 1973 costume on set of X-Men: Days of Future Past. Spoiler warning: The costume clues and details of Star Trek Into Darkness. Spoiler warning: We examine the use of suits, iron or otherwise, in Iron…

Joanna Johnston is a multi-award nominated costume designer with an excitingly eclectic filmography. From Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Back to the Future Part II (1989) and The Sixth Sense (1999) to About a Boy (2002) and Valkyrie (2008). Including most famously Saving Private Ryan (1998), she is now carving a niche in military dress and uniform. Although, considering the subtlety of all Ms. Johnston’s costume design – the cleverly unchanging ensemble worn by Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense for example – this is only a small part of her work. Clothes on Film called up Joanna Johnston for a chat about her most recently released project, War Horse…

For what is certainly the best remembered costume in Saturday Night Fever (1977), John Travolta as Tony Manero wears a brilliant white 3-piece suit to dazzle the disco dance floor. His look defined an era: smart, yet somehow scruffy; classy yet somehow cheap. To keep costs down the film’s director John Badham insisted costume designer Patrizia von Brandenstein procure all outfits off the peg and not make them from scratch. Furthermore this added to realism as Tony could never have afforded bespoke. Interestingly despite the pristine first appearance of Tony’s suit it never really looks clean. Just like the disco scene itself his costume is sullied from the sweaty self-indulgence…

Clothes from films set during 1980s Beetle Juice was a wakeup call; the so-called ‘goth’ look had been dragged out from obscurity and put on to the big screen. Attesting that upbeat and silly often go hand in hand, Beetle Juice stands as one of director Tim Burton’s most cheerfully insane projects. A classic example of mid-eighties opulence – Sigourney Weaver’s oversized cape coat. Flashdance has garnered a considerable costume following in recent years. A capitalist wet dream; one that we have long since woken up from screaming.

George Lazenby’s fashionable Bond is sartorially similar to Daniel Craig in Skyfall. The costumes of Rumble Fish express the importance of teenage dress codes before the segregating journey into adulthood. Armour and indecisiveness: Audrey Hepburn is more than a little black dress in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The religious and cultural significance of the costume design in foreign language Oscar winner A Separation. The subtle differentiation of character through costume design in Moon. “Fashion victim” or “ensemble-y challenged”. Examining the legacy of Mona May’s costume design for Clueless. Edith Head’s costume design for Vertigo demonstrates the power of clothes in forming identities on-screen. The glamorous look of the mid-1930s threads its…

Well if this doesn’t look staggering. Set from 1841, via upstate New York to the cotton fields of Louisiana, 12 Years a Slave is the true story of Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a free black man kidnapped and sold into slavery. As the title suggests, he remains in this Hell for 12 long years. It’s an agonising subject, especially when not satirised like in Quentin Tarantino’s recent Django Unchained. What jumps out of this trailer are the fabrics…so many beautiful fabrics. Just look at the shirts worn by the plantation slaves: linen, tunic style (as they were), cut full with sleeves blooming from the elbows. The film will be particularly…

Arts Illustrated is an elegant new magazine looking at the best and most interesting in culture and design from around the world. Clothes on Film editor Chris Laverty has a regular column in the magazine entitled ‘The Fabric of Cinema’ in which he analyses the symbolic application of costume design in movies, both old and new. The maiden issue of Arts Illustrated focuses on neo-surrelism, and the first Fabric of Cinema column is about that master of costume surrealism, Eiko Ishioka. Laverty takes an in-depth, sometimes critical look at her work with particular focus on The Cell. Below are the first two paragraphs of the article, the remainder of which…

Outfits worn specifically by female actors on television Ray Holman chats exclusively about dressing Matt Smith as the new Doctor. Jim Caviezel as new Number Six spends most of his time in the preview footage wearing a green V-neck sweater and matching lightweight zipper. A straightforward loosely tied scarf around the handbag and Joan is the most stylish woman in the office. As office vamp Joan Holloway, Christina Hendricks gets the lion’s share of groovy outfits on 1960s set TV drama Mad Men.